Increased digital video traffic puts a premium on conserving bandwidth in a given transmission media. This is especially pertinent for bandwidth constrained transmission media, such as cable and wireless. Bandwidth constraint is a challenge that broadcasters, and other providers of digital video content, must overcome to ensure that the quality of the video product meets the expectations of the viewer. Content providers also confront, with respect to demographics and taste, a segmented, kaleidoscopically dynamic, viewer environment.
The selection of an appropriate video compression level is very important to providers that deliver video content over bandwidth constrained channels such as DSL. The provider wants to minimize the load on the network by choosing the highest compression possible. However, to maximize customer satisfaction with the content, such as a movie, for example, typically means providing less compression to provide a higher quality signal. To strike a balance between compression and viewer satisfaction, it is common practice for content providers to simply choose a single compression level that has been deemed “acceptable” by viewers for a set of test content. The single compression rate is then used for all content.
Technological capabilities now make it possible to modulate the compression of a transmitted signal so that content providers no longer need to be tied to a single compression level for all content. The basis upon which to select compression levels, however, is not a technological problem. It is a data problem. The problem is complex, involving, among other things, the identification of one or more characteristic of a customer that can be exploited to distinguish the customer's satisfaction with a selection of content choices, a methodology to collect data on a selected characteristic, and relating the data automatically to the compression level of the transmitted content.
Accordingly, the present invention makes use of data that demonstrates that customer's perceptions of the sound and video quality of a particular piece of video content is greatly influenced by the desirability of that content. Content that is deemed highly desirable by viewers gets higher video quality ratings than does content that is deemed neutral or undesirable. This means that highly desirable content can be compressed further than less desirable content and still achieve the same overall quality rating by viewers in general.